Weekend In Nictau

So tell me, have any of you honestly ever heard of the village of Nictau? I never had until recently. That's where I spent all of last weekend and had a ball, although I'm still exhausted from the weekend, lol.

This past weekend was the famous "Fiddlers On The Tobique" canoe run. Ryan had run into an old friend, Craig, who he went to school with, a few weeks ago at a Chamber of Commerce meeting and Craig invited us to join him and some friends to partake in "Fiddlers" with them; something they do every year. Ryan and I accepted their invitation and were looking forward to it.

Friday I got off work early at lunch time, finished organizing things and met Ryan out at his parent's house. We were borrowing their SUV to haul up the canoe and our gear and leaving them my car to use for the weekend in its place. We loaded up and headed to meet Craig and the rest of our group of 11 people were going away with.

We had another couple drive up with us in the SUV to help with the cost of gas. Their canoe was being towed up by Lance, on a trailer with two others, so they were good to go to jump in with us. We hit the highway and off Craig goes (the one who knew where the heck Nictau was) out of sight in 10 minutes. We were following Lance as the trailer's lights weren't working, so we thought we'd be fine, considering that Lance has gone to "Fiddlers" before. We're almost to the exit for Perth-Andover and Lance motions for us to come up to him on the highway. He rolls down the window and says "Is this the exit"? We were all "Um, I think so...but shouldn't you know"? lol. Ryan took over and led from there on out, lol.

We had to stop once when our rope holding down the front end of the canoe broke and wrapped around the axle of the truck (lol), but five minutes later we were on the road again. It was starting to get dark at this point and we were anxious to get to the campground, as you can imagine, setting up camp in the dark isn't a very fun task. We're driving along and I see a sign on the ground for the road to the Blue Mountain campground, which we were staying at. We drive up the main road a little further, looking for a spot to turn around to go back to the campground road. We see a road called "Blue Mountain Road". Our campground was called "Blue Mountain Campground" so Lance thinks that this road will take us into the back of the campground. Wrong. This road took us to someone's house, lol. We managed to get turned around in their yard and headed back to the campground. Everyone was surprised that we actually made it there and that I was able to spy the campground's sign lying on the ground. We got set up and settled in for the evening with a few beverages around the camp fire.

Saturday we got up, had breakfast and headed up to Riley Brook (30 minute drive from our campground) to put the canoes in. We left one car at the campground to drive up in to get the trucks with the next morning. We put in the canoes at around noon and set out for our float down down the Tobique River.

I'm guessing there about 1,500 participants in the canoe run, so it was a little chaotic on the river in parts, but tons of fun. There was one incident that put a damper on my fun, but didn't break my spirits. That damper was poison ivy. Given that it took nine hours for us to get down the river and back to our camp site and there are no bathrooms along the banks of the Tobique River, we had to pee in the woods. The first time we went to the "bathroom" I felt a bad pain/stinging in my knee. I came out of the woods and looked down at my knee and didn't see any scrapes or bug bites on it. I waded back out to the canoe and told Ryan about my knee hurting. He looked at it and said "Kelly, that's poison ivy". I freaked out a little bit because I had never experienced poison ivy before and was stuck in the middle of a river. Ryan assured me that everything would be fine and that I would just be in pain for a bit. He was right, lol, but after an hour or so, the pain had gone away (and no it wasn't because of the beer, lol) and the swelling and blisters that the ivy caused, were gone. Then at another stop I felt the same feeling again. Yup, I got poison ivy-ied again. I didn't worry too much about it this time because I knew I survived the last bought of it. I just put up with the pain for another hour and was good to go again.

We got back to our campground (our site was right along the river bank, so we just pulled out there) at around 9 p.m., cooked a big supper and settled in for another great evening around the campfire. We got up the next morning, went and got the trucks, cleaned up camp and headed for home. We were all wiped and couldn't wait to get home. It was a great weekend, but nice to get home and crash in my own bed too.